by Richard Peck
She was sitting with the firelight on her face in a chintz-covered sofa beside Mrs. Lawver, nodding at her conversation. When I saw how Phil’s mother was dressed, I was glad I hadn’t given in to Mother’s wardrobe suggestion. She stood up in a long black crepe skirt and a dressy blouse, along with a string of the family pearls.
Then she turned her cameo face to us and said, “Gail, how nice. How is your darling mother? I haven’t seen her since the Women’s Exchange benefit. And your father? That grueling commute every day! How awful for him!” She had one of those distantly echoing voices, coming to you from high atop a Connecticut hill.
Phil retreated behind the sofa from all this graciousness, bumping into his father, a shorter, rounder version of Phil. “And Steve—it is Steve, isn’t it? How very nice that you could come.” Mrs. Lawver put out a long white hand and gathered Steve into the circle.
They were like a family portrait in faded, muted colors. A painting of themselves in their own museum. Study in Gray Flannel and Black Crepe.
“Otis, come and meet these young people. Gail is the Osburnes’ daughter. You know those people who have done such a sweet restoration of the old Milton house. Really very clever. Father’s an architect.
“And this is the youngest Pastorini boy.”
Mr. Lawver ambled forward and put out his soft hand. “Pastorini? Pastorini?” he said, “Aren’t they the—”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Lawver cut in smoothly. “And why don’t you pour the young people glasses of tomato juice while we have our sherry? Phil, darling, help your father.” And Phil, who I’d seen blind drunk on straight Scotch during training season, did.
* * *
There were candles in the dining-room chandelier, and a woman in a uniform to do the serving. Before we were through the onion soup, Alison had turned into a stranger. We were fairly close friends, tending to sudden eye contact and uncontrollable giggles, but she was aging by the minute, matching Mrs. Lawver’s polite and penetrating questions with precise answers. Only her eyes were eager.
“I know nothing about finance, but I should have thought your father got out of banking at just the right moment, Alison. That awful recession hit some people terribly hard.”
“Yes,” Alison said in a sort of finishing-school voice. “And being in business in Oldfield Village, he can be more active in the community.”
“Exactly. We’re very pleased to see him ushering at church. You were Episcopalians in New York, before you came up here?”
“I was christened at Trinity.”
She’ll be asking for a look at Alison’s teeth next, I thought. Then I noticed Phil looking at me. I could just see his eye between two chrysanthemums in the bowl on the table. It was like being watched through a hedge. If I’d ever liked being looked at—by anybody—I forgot it immediately. And if I’d ever thought I liked Phil Lawver, I suddenly knew better. I guess I’d always taken him on faith because Alison was so wrapped up in him. Let him look at her, I thought and went back to dealing with the onion soup that was turning cold and somewhat slimy.
Mr. Lawver pulled his vest down over his stomach and turned to Steve. “You be going into your family’s line of work when you get out of high school, young fellow? You plumbers charge more than doctors.”
Then Alison did look at me, quickly, almost apologizing with her eyes. Even Phil stirred.
“Well, Mr. Lawver,” Steve said, “I have one older brother who’s already in the business with Dad. And another brother who’s a lifer in the Marines down at Parris Island. I think I’ll strike out in a direction of my own.”
“Father,” Phil muttered, “Steve here has a perfect academic record. All A’s. He’s . . . famous for it.”
“Nobody told me.” Mr. Lawver cleared his throat. “Well, then, Steve, maybe you and Phil will be going up to Yale together.”
“I suppose Steve has a better chance of getting into Yale than I do, Father. If he wants to go.”
“You’ll get in, Phil.” Mr. Lawver patted the tablecloth confidently. “We always get in. Edna, bring in the roast!”
“Hasn’t it been curious weather this autumn,” Mrs. Lawver remarked. “All that rain and lightning and now so dry.”
* * *
It seemed a lifetime, but we got away by nine. When Steve and I left, the Lawvers assembled in the front hall, Alison next to Phil. Rehearsing her role, I thought. I didn’t envy her. I just marveled at how sure she was about what she wanted. I wasn’t sure about anything.
Steve and I didn’t say anything until we’d walked the curve of the drive. Then when we passed through the stone gates, we both let out long, relieved sighs. “May the four of them live happily ever after,” I said.
“Somehow, I don’t think happiness has anything to do with it,” Steve said. “What a night. Anyway it was good seeing Edna.”
“Edna? Who’s Edna?”
“The Lawvers’ cook. The silent slave in the uniform. She’s my mom’s cousin.”
“Oh.” And that’s all I could think of to say to that.
“But back to real life,” Steve said as we strolled along in the shadows of the oaks. “If I know my brother’s habits, which I do, he’ll be down in the Village Center at the Nutmeg Tavern. Let’s wander on down there, and I’ll borrow his car. Then we can drive out to the lake.”
“We’d better not. Mother—”
“I heard your mother when we left. She meant me to. But it’s early yet. We’ll be back in an hour or so.”
We were already walking toward the Village Center instead of back to my house, I noticed. Either Steve was steering me, or my feet had minds of their own. “I don’t think we’d better.”
“You mean you don’t want to.”
“Don’t push me into that role,” I said.
“You mean the well-known playing-hard-to-get?”
“That’s the one. It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” The leaf shadows made the brick sidewalk wavery underfoot. We paced along with our arms around each other’s waist.
“You’re still . . .”
“I’m still what?” I said.
“Taking them.”
“The pill?”
“Yes. Why not just ask me that all in one sentence?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I come from a long line of Italian peasants who don’t speak the sacred word s-e-x out loud. But it’s more than just that with us, isn’t it?”
“I guess—yes. But I don’t know how much more. Alison is always—”
“Let’s leave Alison out. There’s no room for her in this conversation.”
“It’s just that she’s so positive about what she wants. I mean how can she know what’ll be right for her ten years from now? I can’t see ten minutes ahead.” I gave up then because I couldn’t get my words to fit around my thoughts. Even talking seemed hopeless, without mentioning basic things like money and what our parents thought and the fact that neither one of us had really gone with other people.
“Just answer me one thing,” my mother had said back when Steve and I were first together. “Would you be half as interested in this boy if he weren’t the plumber’s son? You surely know how clannish these . . . local families can be. What if he were a boy from your own background? Then how would he look to you?”
“Then he wouldn’t be Steve,” I told her, but she said that was no answer. And it wasn’t.
“Some people just concentrate on the present and let the future take care of itself,” Steve said finally.
“Are you like that?”
“No.”
“Neither am I.”
But we went out to the lake anyway. Out to that empty cottage that Steve’s dad used for a fishing shack in the summer. The only place where we thought we were alone.
CHAPTER
Two
The next night the eleven o’clock news was winding down through sports and local weather, promising a golden oldie classic for the late show. I sat through the commercials in
the faint hope that I hadn’t seen the movie before. I had. Victor Mature, Carole Landis, and Betty Grable in I Wake Up Screaming. For the second time in a month. And not golden or classic. Just an oldie. The switchboard operator, Harry, kills Carol Landis. And Betty is safe in Victor’s arms, but it takes them ninety minutes to get there.
I turned off the set and checked my watch against the mantel clock. Eleven thirty-one. Twenty-nine minutes until the going baby-sitter rate rose seventy-five cents an hour. Not that I was miserly, not then. In fact I felt I owed Mrs. Montgomery a rebate. She always had Angie and Missy fed and bedded before I came on duty, even though the older one was nearly five and hyperactive. So it was easy money at Mrs. Montgomery’s. All I had to do was hold the fort and stare at my homework or the set.
She kept a pretty meager refrigerator, but it was always good for a can of Diet-Rite. I drifted down the dark hall to the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. I wouldn’t have minded washing them except that Mrs. Montgomery never exploited her sitters with domestic chores. She didn’t go in much for chores herself.
A monument to her heftier days was still taped to the refrigerator door. A curling note lettered in bold black:
A moment on the lips—
Forever on the hips
Right after her divorce she put on a lot of weight. But then she pulled herself together when she joined the Oldfield Village Singles and Previously Marrieds Club. It altered her life, she said. I sat for her every Saturday night, when the club held its parties.
Losing a skirmish with my conscience, I took the last can of Diet-Rite and flipped off the top. I was just walking back through the hall past the phone when it rang. I answered, but no one spoke at the other end.
When I try to remember, now that I know who it was, I wonder if there was any sound. I may have heard breathing, or it may have been my own. Every time I said hello, my voice sounded more and more hollow.
Finally I hung up, and the hellos echoed through the house. I’d just made it back to the living room when the phone rang again. I ran back. But again there was the same tense silence at the other end.
I said hello only once and then felt that tightness in the throat for the first time: the feeling that I was confronting a silent, voiceless, faceless stranger. Somebody reaching out for me.
I stood there in the dimness, pressing the receiver into my ear. The click came when someone, somewhere, hung up.
The baby sitter’s best defense is calm. Whenever I felt a wave of nervousness or even uncertainty, I had the habit of reaching for the small green stone carved in the heart shape. I’d bought a gold chain for it and was never without it. Steve had given it to me for my sixteenth birthday in the spring. I stood there in the hallway with one hand on the receiver and the other working the little stone heart like a worry bead. And then, automatically, I dialed Steve’s number.
He answered in the middle of the first ring.
“Home?” he said.
“No. I’m still at Mrs. Montgomery’s.”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing . . . What are you doing?”
“Reading and listening to a tape.”
“What is it?”
“As a matter of fact, it’s Rubenstein playing the Chopin Concerto Number One, backed up by the London Symphony, conducted by Skrowaczewski,” Steve said like an FM radio announcer.
“Turn it up so I can hear it.” I wondered why I’d asked that.
The music welled up in the background. “Have you freaked out over Skrowaczewski?” he said. We went on talking over the Chopin sound. I don’t know what we said, but his voice pulled me away from the reason I’d called.
I always liked talking to Steve away from home because I sometimes thought my mother listened on her extension. But I didn’t call him every time I baby-sat because of his mother. And in Oldfield Village, having a boy over when you’re sitting is kind of a taboo. I hadn’t broken it yet.
We were running short of conversation when he said, “Gail, you were practically as smooth as Alison last night at Lord and Lady Lawver’s. You sound different tonight. You okay?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I miss you.” He said that fast. I had a vision of his family sitting in front of the TV one room away, maybe not completely absorbed in I Wake Up Screaming. There was a silent moment then, when we both thought of the night before, the rustle from the trees across the lake. The conversation trailed off.
Later I was sitting in the living room, concentrating on the clock. The minute hand was pushing twelve thirty, and I was running the little green heart up and down the gold chain. The warm stone whispered over the tiny links.
Steve had given me my birthday present at school. He’d dropped the little white box on my tray in the cafeteria. I hadn’t even noticed it before I lifted the milk carton.
Between the layers of cotton the heart was wrapped in a tube of graph paper, like an ancient scroll. A Steve touch. On the scroll he’d printed a quotation with little flourishes:
My heart is turn’d to stone: I strike
it, and it hurts my hand. O, the
world hath not a sweeter creature!
She might lie by an emperor’s side,
and command him tasks.
I cradled it in my palm, Steve’s stone heart. And because the clatter of the cafeteria is no place for sentiment, I only said, “I had to fall for an intellectual. I give up. What’s the flattering quotation from?”
“You’re gaining on me,” he said. “Last fall you’d have thought I wrote it myself.”
“As a matter of fact, not,” I said. “Last fall you were still writing things like, ‘I’ll weave white violets into—’”
“All right, all right,” he said, “forget last fall. It’s from Othello.”
So that night I started reading Othello. I tried not to be nudged too far by Steve’s attempts at compensatory education. There were times when he made me feel like a benumbed Playboy bunny. And, after all, I was on the honor roll, even if I wasn’t on the top of it. I was well into Othello before I found out it was about a jealous husband who smothers his wife.
It was like Steve to extract a few lines of love from a tragedy.
Behind the mantel clock was a mirror. Something moved in it and made me shift my gaze from the clock’s hands. Somebody had stepped into the dark hall directly behind me. I jumped half off the sofa, and my fingers jerked at the stone heart. The chain popped at the back of my neck and fell in a gold puddle in my hand.
“Oh Lord, Gail, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Mrs. Montgomery stepped into the light of the living room. Then she turned back into the hall and said to someone out on the front steps, “No, really, I think not. It’s late. I’ll say good night to you here.” As she closed the door, I pulled myself together.
“You must have been miles away not to hear the key in the door,” she said, striding into the room. “But look, I’m sorry I scared you. Everything go all right? Kids quiet? Any calls?”
“Calls,” I said, “but no one at the other end.”
“It’s this dratted small town service. The phone’s dead half the time and wildly erratic the other half. But they bill you with stunning regularity.” She fell into an easy chair and kicked her somewhat knobby feet out of a pair of high-heeled sandals.
“Everybody danced for a good three hours,” she said and wiggled her toes. “Just to prove we still can. It was a cross between a college hop and an old folks’ home. I wouldn’t be your age again for anything, but I wish my feet were.” I was already computing my sitter fee. “Well, what’s the damage?” When I told her, she said, “I don’t worry when you’re here. One of the several drawbacks of life in this quaint community is that most of the youngsters—people—your age are so rich they don’t need the extra money.”
I knew that better than she did. She was digging through her little beaded handbag for the money. When she handed it over, there was a considerable wad. I counted three dollars o
ver.
“It’s for the jeweler to fix your chain,” she said. And I realized I was still holding it in my hand. I tried to give the money back, but she waved it away. “All my fault,” she said.
Then she was struggling back into her shoes and bending over to fasten up the buckles. “I’m driving you home tonight.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “It’s only five blocks, and besides the kids—”
“The kids will be all right for ten minutes. You’re jumpy and you’re pale. You don’t need a walk home in the dark, and it’s too late to call your dad out of bed to come over for you.”
When we were driving along the empty street, Mrs. Montgomery said, “Sometimes I feel guilty tying up your Saturday nights. You go out with the Pastorini boy, don’t you?”
“There are absolutely no secrets in this hamlet.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said with emphasis.
“Yes, we go together. But we sort of . . . limit it.”
A loud silence followed. “That’s cryptic.”
“Well, my parents aren’t wild about the idea, and his probably aren’t either.”
“Romeo and Juliet in western Connecticut,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”
“Neither can I. I get all the selections from Shakespeare I need directly from Steve.”
“I must have been misinformed about the youth culture. You go around spouting Shakespeare at each other? I was under the impression you were all majoring in remedial reading—no offense meant.”
“Well, Steve’s head is packed with scholarship. It occasionally overflows.”
“He’s very bright, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And so are you.”
“Less intellectual. Maybe less motivated. And we’re both very young.”
Mrs. Montgomery made a wild turn into our street. “When the very young mention that they’re very young, I suspect dark plots and hidden secrets. Do you know what I’m doing?”
“No. What?”
“Idly prying. Tell me to shut up.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “I always profit by talking to older women of broad experience.”
